Net.Create: Network Analysis in Collaborative Co-Construction of Historical Context in a Large Undergraduate Classroom

Abstract

History educators in large-lecture humanities undergraduate classrooms struggle to support reading comprehension, defined as the ability to simultaneously read a complex text critically, understand the text’s details and context, and vet the text’s claims. Critical reading of historical texts in particular helps bridge the gap between seeing history as memorization-oriented and seeing it as an inquiry-oriented discipline that reconstructs narrative and context. Net.Create is an open-source, network-analysis software tool paired with activities that support intuitive creation and revision of a network data set and accompanying visualization, and through these representational practices, reading comprehension in humanities classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to emphasize context reconstruction over memorization.